Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer

Our mission is pretty simple: we believe that everyone deserves access to sophisticated financial advice. Over the past five years, Wealthfront has built a technology company focused on re-architecting the finance industry, and along the way we’ve created a new category known as automated investment services (aka ‘robo-advisors’, but truth be told we’re fairly light on robots). What that actually means is we build software that enables us to democratize access to services typically reserved for the ultra-wealthy, and through automation we can deliver those services to investors at an incredibly low cost. And it’s working; we have clients across the country who trust us with over $7 billion in assets -- and we’re just getting started!

We recently launched a new user experience that lays the foundation for a future where Wealthfront is the only financial advisor our clients will ever need. To accomplish this, we’ve redesigned and rebuilt our data platform to combine offline and online computation to serve personalized advice and will ultimately be the center of our clients’ financial lives.

We’re looking for engineers who are excited to focus on building the data infrastructure to scale compute for our business. This includes making tradeoffs between online, offline, and streaming architectures, as well as understanding the product well enough to understand the impact these decisions will make on clients.

What You'll Work On

Spark: As data engineers, we want to move fast, and we want our code to move fast as well. We’ve recently transitioned from Hadoop to Spark, and we are continuing to increase the performance of our data pipelines while simultaneously increasing the complexity of the jobs that run on top of them. We use Spark in both streaming and batch mode. You'll be expected to improve the infrastructure while you implement on top of it.

Machine learning: We use statistics to solve hard problems. Whether we’re running regression to better understand our business or clustering as part of a client-facing data pipeline, statistical modeling is key to our business.

Data quality: A model is only good if it is correct and built on recent data. We put a strong emphasis on data quality. We write unit tests to test the functional correctness of each module and meta-tests to guard against common programming errors. Throughout our data pipelines we run automated sanity checks on live data, alerting if any data is stale or values fall outside of expected ranges.

What You Have

5+ years in a data engineering role.

Advanced knowledge of the Spark/Hadoop ecosystem.

Advanced knowledge of Java. Familiarity with Scala preferred.

Experience with machine learning and statistical modeling.

A BS in computer science or a related field. An MS or PhD is a plus.

Wealthfront is the only robo-advisor to offer both investment management and financial planning exclusively through software. Because of this approach, we've quickly become the most trusted advisor among young people. Anyone can open a Wealthfront investment account with $500 to access a unique Passive+ investment strategy that includes a combination of a diversified portfolio of ETFs and tax minimization strategies. All clients receive financial planning through the service, Path, at no additional cost. The company does not charge management fees on the first $10,000 and for amounts above that the annual management fee is 0.25% - a fraction of what financial advisors charge. The company's strategy is to take high end financial services that are reserved for those who have millions of dollars, and deliver them to young consumers through software. The majority of Wealthfront clients are in their 30s and 40s and have less than $1 million to invest. Wealthfront was founded by Andy Rachleff and Dan Carroll, who launched the service in December 2011. The company has raised over $129 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Social + Capital and Spark Capital, and is based in Redwood City, CA. For more information please visit www.wealthfront.com.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.